Thanks for the question – this is Ben (subject of the article).
I think living on minimum wage is a nice thing for journalists to put as a headline, but I tend to shy away from it as actual advice. If you are able to donate $100,000 per year as an engineer and then your car breaks down, making you unable to get to your job, what then? Are you really going to not fix your car and therefore quit your job, just so you can save $500 on the repair and meet some arbitrary spending target? That would be pretty stupid.
The [giving what we can](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/join/) pledge is that you will donate 10% of your income, and I encourage people to take that since 10% is a reasonable amount to donate (particularly for the sort of person who is reading hacker news).
Health eFilings software enables physicians who provide better care to get paid more money.
We are looking for innovative, self-starting software developers to create additional and manage existing back end integrations with Electronic Heath Record (EHR) systems as well as working with the team to continuously develop and improve our current and future software products.
We believe in working smarter not harder: much of our backend code is “meta-“ code that parses government specifications and then generates our actual code from that.
This position has large amounts of autonomy, and you are held accountable for results, not process. You will have the opportunity to grow into management or tech leadership. This position reports to the CTO.
Health eFilings, software developer, REMOTE (US only)
Venture backed startup; our software enables physicians who provide better care to get paid more.
We have five team members, tons of paying customers, and are looking for another two awesome backend developers to help us scale.
* Working software in the hands of customers is the best measure of progress
* We like functional design patterns and meta-programming
* We use Rails, Backbone+Handlebars and Mongo, but believe in using the right tool for the job.
Venture backed startup which is the premier provider of software solutions that enable health care providers to comply with Medicare reporting regulations while saving them time and money, enabling them to focus on delivering quality care.
We recently closed our seed round, have four employees, tons of paying customers, and are looking for an awesome backend developer to help us scale.
* Working software in the hands of customers is the best measure of progress
* We like functional design patterns and meta-programming
* We use Rails, Backbone+Handlebars and Mongo, but believe in using the right tool for the job.
Generally researchers identify industries by using a code system like [NAICS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Industry_Classif...). My guess is that the Google founders would not have been in a similar industry code, but I'm not familiar enough with Stanford to say for sure.
I would disagree with the causality. The sort of person who can get an influential job in a top-tier startup is probably also the sort of person who can start a good company.
And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that there was an unfilled need in the marketplace?
People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower (correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.
Exactly my point actually. You work in an industry, might even have a cozy corporate job and great benefits. You're on a solid career trajectory. Leaving that to start a company rarely makes financial sense. But most people aren't assessing it through that lens. They know their industry, have a great idea, and they HAVE TO DO IT. Even if financially it seems nuts!
I think this is in interesting point (modulo the remark made elsewhere about "assuring" success), but I don't have the evidence to know how it should affect your decisions.
The research I cited found that first time and failed entrepreneurs have a 20% chance of success, whereas "skilled" entrepreneurs have a 30% chance of success. So if you can become "skilled" in one stint of employment, then you would expect to succeed sooner by being employed first than if you were doing startups that whole time.
But it's entirely possible that it takes multiple stints of direct employment to obtain whatever knowledge makes you skilled, in which case your argument is valid. I just don't know of any evidence about this though.
> I'm just pointing out something fairly obivous - that not participating in a market is not a very effective way of changing how that market produces things.
Everyone participates in the market for buying food. There's probably someone out there who has the very narrow goal of changing how meat (and only meat) is produced, but for everyone else this is a strawman argument.
We want to change food production, and overpaying for similar products is obviously going to be less of a signal than larger dietary changes.
I listed some causes I think are valuable in the interview, but in general I think GiveWell and ACE are good evaluators:
* http://www.givewell.org/ * http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/
For each charity they recommend, they have estimates of number of lives saved per dollar.